What is Nvivo

NVivo key terms:

• Sources are your research materials including documents, PDFs, datasets, audio, video, pictures, memos and framework matrices.
• Coding is the process of gathering material by topic, theme or case. For example, selectin a paragraph about water quality and coding it at the node ‘water quality’.
• Nodes are containers for your coding—they let you gather related material in one place so that you can look for emerging patterns and ideas.
• Source classifications let you record information about your sources—for example, bibliographical data.
• Node classifications allow to you record information about people, places or other cases for example, demographic data about people.

Getting Started Guide

Task

(bolded topics are most important)

• Read getting started guide to get basic knowledge (16-44)
• Open Nvivo and open help tool (question mark, upper-right corner). Explore topics carefully.
• Open Sample Project in Nvivo
  • Sources pane (left side of the UI)
    
    • Explore interviews -folder (check especially video interview to see how video and transcription are synced)
    • Look into Area and township -folder. Images can be used as sources also. Try to code image (draw rectangular to image and click right button)
    • Check Social Media and survey folders in order to get picture that web sites and questionnaires can be used also as sources
    • IMPORT document to Nvivo
  • Nodes pane
    
    • Click economy node. List of references (node content) in sources will be generated. Explore it to see which sources include "economy node"
    • Go to VIew tab (top of the screen)
      • turn stripes on
      • turn highlights on
  • Classifications
    • Check what kind of classifications have been done
    • Go to different sets of sources and open classification sheets
  • Queries pane
    • Coding comparison: two persons code same content and Nvivo calculates similarity of coding. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT for validity / reliability of your study.
    • Other queries are for exploring your nodes/data, but are for "advanced users" .. I have used queries to quantify my qualitative data. Check what kind of queries have been done in sample project
  • Reports
    • You can get coding summaries, node summaries etc. reports by using this dialog. Quite nice for getting an overview of your nodes etc.